Share the Ceiling
by takingoffmyshoes
Summary: In which Peter and Clint have mad hangs and Tony is only slightly traumatized.


"Hey, look! Look, look, looklooklook!"

Sighing, Clint Barton ducked his head down between his outstretched arms to look at Peter Parker. Who was sitting on his head.

"Dude, that's like awesome _and_ terrifying." Not to mention it looked super weird upside-down. Still, Clint could be appreciative. He knew people who'd worked their whole lives to be able to do that. Even then, though, it had begged a really good question: what's the point?

"Hey, Parker," he asked, raising his head and shifting his weight to one hand ( _slowly_ : he'd made that mistake once and was never going to again). He lifted the other arm to hover parallel to the floor and checked his balance before continuing. "I've always wondered – what's the point of doing that? I mean, it looks cool and shit, but doesn't it rearrange your organs or something?"

"Well," said Peter, a little breathlessly – and that answered the second part of Clint's question – "the more flexible your back is, the tighter you can make your turns and flips and stuff. It's all...about...control."

Clint ducked his head again to see Parker easing his weight back to rest on his chin and rib cage. "Don't kill yourself, kid," he warned, only half joking. Even years with a circus hadn't convinced him that bending like that was natural.

"You...just...wait," Peter muttered stiffly, and slowly began to straighten his legs out in front of him. "Wait... Wait... Ow, shit..."

It hurt Clint even more to watch upside down, so he dropped his right arm back to the mat and hunched his shoulders, rolling through a somersault up to standing in one smooth motion. He came to stand over Peter, who, mirroring Clint's earlier action, raised first one hand from the padded floor then the other. "Oh yeah," he crowed. "No hands!"

"Hey, Clint, you seen– Holy fuck, _Parker!_ " Tony popped his head around the door frame and jerked back as if he'd been shot, clutching his chest in a way that would have been more comical if he didn't actually have serious heart problems. Like, you know, shrapnel. "Jesus _Christ_ , what the hell are you doing?"

"Um, stretching?" Only Peter Parker could look and sound completely innocent while his ass was on top of his own head.

"Shit," Tony said again, weakly, still frozen in the doorway, and unconsciously rubbed the back of his neck. Clint hoped Peter'd been 'stretching' his neck, too, if he was going to have it bent up that way.

"Okay, okay, I'm stopping." He made a couple abortive motions, then glanced up at Clint with well-feigned worry. "Uh, Clint? Little help here?"

He snorted. "Nice try, Parker." He didn't actually want Tony to blow a gasket thinking the kid was hurting himself.

"Yeah, yeah, look who knows all the tricks in the book," Peter muttered, putting his hands back down and swinging his legs around in a way that made made Tony curse faintly and clutch at the wall. It didn't actually unscrew his lower half, though, and if he just lay bonelessly, face-down on the mat, regretting his life choices, at least he was still in one piece.

Clint felt a very sudden, very strong urge to poke him with a stick. His bow was just across the room, actually. That would work. He looked back to Tony to ask if he would go get it, but stopped at his half-awed, half-disgusted expression.

"What's the matter, Stark? I thought you'd go for that kind of thing." He kept his face and voice carefully innocent, but there was no risk of Tony calling him on it.

Tony shook his head jerkily, expression still vaguely repulsed. "There's flexibility," he explained, "and then there's _that_." He waved at Peter's still-prone-and-absolutely-begging-for-a-chalk-outline form.

Clint shrugged. "Your loss. Not that I'm encouraging it or anything, but still." He swung his arms across his chest, loosening up his shoulders. Handsprings next, he thought. Or dive-rolls. Or both. "Oh, did you want something?"

"What? Oh, um, no. I'm just gonna...go find Steve and _not_ tell him what Spider-boy's been doing."

Clint paused for a moment to savor the hypothetical look on Cap's face when he hypothetically heard Tony's hypothetical description.

"I resent that," Peter mumbled into the mat. "Both the name and the implication."

"Oh, get your face out of that thing," Clint admonished, giving in just slightly and nudging him with his toe. "You don't know what's been there."

Peter rolled onto his back, lay there for few more seconds, then ninja-flipped himself to his feet.

Tony laughed in a quietly hysterical way and turned back down the hall, leaving the two of them to their incredibly awesome acrobat ways.

"So what now?" Peter asked, oscillating his head until his neck gave a series of cracks. Oh, good. He did actually have a spine, then.

"Whatever you want to do, man. It's not like you need a routine." Parker had only been with the Avengers for a couple or months, and Clint got the sense he was still settling into the idea of working with a team. Some things, he just wasn't used to sharing. But maybe that was because he had moved onto their turf, but they had yet to see things through his eyes. Well, that could change.

Clint eyed the collection of bars, ropes, and chains that dangled from the high-ceilinged room: there were several training areas, but this one was the designated acrobatics space, and it provided plenty of challenges.

"First one to the rafters wins?"

"You're on."

There was a reason he was called Spider-Man, after all, but Clint had grown up with this stuff. And if he was honest, it was a lot more fun when he had someone to share the ceiling with.

* * *

 _I am definitely not posting old fills in an attempt to avoid packing for college, but even if I were, FanFiction's protocols would not allow me to link the original prompt. You can, however, find it in the AO3 version of this fic if you're interested._

 _Thank you for reading!_


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